Aligning ontologies, evaluating concept similarities and visualizing results

Abstract

Ontologies have been created for many different subjects and by independent groups around the world. The nonexistence of a commonly accepted and used general purpose upper-ontology makes it difficult to integrate these ontologies through merge and alignment operations. The majority of the algorithms proposed so far rely on syntactic analysis, disregarding the structural properties of the source ontologies. In our previous work, we proposed an alignment method that considers the structural properties of an upper-ontology constructed using a thesaurus and Formal Concept Analysis technique (FCA). We also analyzed the FCA's lattice structure and proposed a measure of similarity based on Tversky's model, which allowed us to identify closely related concepts in different source ontologies. In this paper, we apply the alignment method to ontologies developed for a completely different domain, and enhance the solution by providing a navigational aid for the lattice. It is well known that one of the main drawbacks of the application of FCA is that the resulting lattice soon becomes cluttered when the number of objects and attributes increases. The proposed solution is based on hyperbolic visualization and on structural elements of the lattice. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.